[Chorus]
Listen up and I'll tell a story
About an artist growing old
Some would try for fame and glory
Others aren't so bold

[Verse 2]
The artist walks alone
Someone says behind his back
"He's got his gall to call himself that!
He doesn't even know where he's at!"
The artist walks among the flowers
Appreciating the sun
He does this all his waking hours
But is it really so wrong?
They sit in front of their TVs
Saying, "Hey! This is fun!"
And they laugh at the artist
Saying, "He doesn't know how to have fun."
The best things in life are truly free
Singing birds and laughing bees
"You've got me wrong", says he
"The sun don't shine in your TV"

[Chorus]
Listen up and I'll tell a story
About an artist growing old
Some would try for fame and glory
Others aren't so bold

[Chorus]
Listen up and I'll tell a story
About an artist growing old
Some would try for fame and glory
Others just like to watch the world

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About “Story of an Artist”

“Story Of An Artist” is a telling of the traditional “artist’s narrative”: they are rejected by friends, family, and society for thinking outside of the box and doing what they love.

The song is likely autobiographical for Johnston, who as a young musician became “obsessed” with fame and art to the point where it became debilitating to his day-to-day life, holing himself up in his basement to write. In the words of his close friend, David Thornberry:

“He was an obsessive creator, drawing and writing all the time. It wasn’t about ‘if I get famous’ but ‘when I get famous.’ He assumed that if he put in the time, tried to be in the right place at the right time, met the right people, it would happen.”

Though Johnston achieved cult notoriety later into his career, the peak of which was characterized by Kurt Cobain wearing his “Hi, How Are You?” album artwork on a t-shirt repeatedly for the last 18 months of his life, he did seem to suffer from delusions of grandeur about his future fame as a young artist, partially stemming from his undiagnosed bipolar depression and schizophrenia. This unnatural fascination with fame upset his main caretakers, his mother and father, who often scolded him for his lack of a traditional work ethic. In his mother’s words:

“We just produced a great big lazy bum! And you have no shame. You like it that way!”

This type of criticism had a clear effect not only on his self esteem, but on his writing. In his song “Lazy”, he bitterly croons:

Well I made some mistakes but
I ain’t learned a lesson
That I don’t wanna hear about responsibilities
I got less important things to do
I’m lazy – Oh yeah

Johnston’s life seems to be an almost hyperbolic crystallization of the “artist’s narrative” he writes about – save for a lack of notoriety – to the point where one might have difficulty seeing this song as pure allegory rather than something somewhat self-referential.